Is Black Box Testing Dead?

What Is Black Box Testing?

You can do this without giving much thought to how something worked. What you really care about is whether or not its behavior accurately reflected the stated requirements.

Is Black Box Testing Dead?

Black box testing isn't dead yet. But it's changing.

Teams are embracing Agile development — and Agile testing. And the roles of testers and developers are blurring, as teams strive to get products out the door faster.

So, the nature of testing has changed.

Code Coverage vs. Test Coverage

Test coverage makes sure there are functional tests for all stated requirements. It's a metric of black box testing because it doesn’t provide insight of anything underneath the surface of the application.

Code coverage measures the execution pathways through the code. It's a measure of how effective testing is at reaching as much of the code as possible.

In practice, it’s not feasible to get 100 percent of code coverage. Some code exists for very obscure error-handling situations. In other cases, some states simply aren’t reachable.

But both test coverage and code coverage are needed.

Testers will always have to know if the product’s functionality meets the business needs. But they also have to understand how effective that testing is in actually exercising the underlying code.

Ideally, testers should be running code coverage at the same time they’re executing their tests, so that they understand how comprehensive their test cases really are.